MSP·SIGNALBeta

Headline finding · measured 2026-09-03

Managed IT is advertised at $75 to $100 per user per month.

A cost benchmark built from published prices rather than a survey: 369 US providers, 718 published tiers, every figure traceable to a page a buyer can read.

$75–$100

median entry tier to median top tier, per user per month

n = 369 of 39,351 in-scope US providers that publish a per-user, per-month rate, showing 718 separate tiers between them. Entry tier is each firm's cheapest; top tier is each firm's most expensive. Rates outside $10 to $500 a seat are excluded as extraction errors — 50 rows below, 25 above. Flat, hourly, per-device and per-server rates are quoted separately and never averaged in. as of 2026-09-03.

Where a published seat rate lands
Entry tier
each firm's cheapest — 369 firms
25th pct
$29
Median
$75
75th pct
$109
90th pct
$150
All published tiers
718 tiers, same firms
25th pct
$40
Median
$99
75th pct
$150
90th pct
$205
The four units US providers actually publish
Per user, per month
369 firms
Median
$75
Middle half
$29–$109
Top tenth
$150+
Everything else
median, by unit
Flat monthly
$500 (371 firms)
Hourly
$125 (148 firms)
Per device
$49.99 (102 firms)
Median entry price per user / month, by provider headcount
1–4 staff75USD
5–987.5USD
10–2482.5USD
25–4974USD

What managed IT costs

369 US providers publish a per-user, per-month rate, and between them they show 718 separate tiers. The median firm's cheapest tier is $75 a seat. The median firm's most expensive tier is $100. Across all 718 published tiers the median is $99.

That range is the honest answer to what managed IT costs, and a single number is not. Half of these firms publish more than one tier, and the distance between their cheapest and their dearest is the entire product decision a buyer is making.

The spread is wide at both ends. A quarter of entry tiers start at $29 a seat or below — usually a single add-on rather than a full managed service. A tenth of all published tiers sit above $205.

Three other units are common enough to price on their own, and none of them can be averaged with the per-seat figure. 371 firms publish a flat monthly fee, median $500 a month. 148 publish an hourly rate, median $125 an hour. 102 publish a per-device rate, median $49.99 per device per month.

Bigger providers do not charge more per seat

Sorted by headcount, the median entry tier barely moves: $75 a seat at firms with one to four staff, $87.50 at five to nine, $82.50 at ten to twenty-four, and $74 at twenty-five to forty-nine.

Whatever a larger provider is selling — bench depth, a staffed NOC, a formal escalation path — it is not showing up as a higher published seat rate. The differences that matter live in what the tier includes, and a price alone cannot tell you that.

How to compare three quotes

Get all three into the same unit before comparing anything. A $75 seat rate and a $500 flat monthly fee are the same price at about seven users and wildly different at fifty.

Ask what the seat minimum is. A per-user rate with a fifteen-seat floor is a flat fee wearing a per-user label.

Ask what sits outside the rate: onboarding, projects, hardware, after-hours response, third-party licenses.

Only 2.3% of US providers publish any price at all, so the absence of a price on a competitor's site tells you nothing about whether they are expensive.

What this number can't tell you

  • ·This is a benchmark of published prices, not of contracts. Providers who quote only on a call are invisible here, and they are not a random sample.
  • ·Entry tier and top tier are each firm's cheapest and most expensive published per-user, per-month rate. 183 of the 369 firms publish only one tier, so for half the sample those two numbers are the same.
  • ·Every figure here is an advertised rate. None of it is contract value, and a quote for a real environment will usually land above the entry tier.
  • ·Rates outside $10 to $500 a seat are excluded as extraction errors: 50 rows below and 25 above.
  • ·Rates below about $30 a seat are frequently a single add-on — backup, email security, a helpdesk-only tier — rather than a full managed service, and they pull the lower percentiles down.
  • ·The headcount bands rest on small samples: 140 firms at 1–4 staff, 78 at 5–9, 78 at 10–24 and 30 at 25–49. The 50–99 band has only 13 publishing firms and is not shown.
  • ·Never convert between units. normalized_user_month is deliberately null wherever a rate cannot be honestly converted to a per-seat figure.
  • ·Pricing has been checked on 32,365 of 39,351 firms.

What to do about it

  • ▸Buying: ask for the price in per-user, per-month terms and ask what the seat minimum is. Those two questions make three quotes comparable.
  • ▸Selling: publishing a starting price puts you in the 2.3% of providers a buyer can shortlist before the call.

Where does your firm sit on this?

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